Rotadom
Satan's Plaything
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- Oct 14, 2017
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The Truth About Fentanyl Trafficking
Fentanyl Is Smuggled for U.S. Citizens By U.S. Citizens, Not Asylum Seekers
Here are facts:
- Fentanyl smuggling is ultimately funded by U.S. consumers who pay for illicit opioids: nearly 99 percent of whom are U.S. citizens.
- In 2021, U.S. citizens were 86.3 percent of convicted fentanyl drug traffickers—ten times greater than convictions of illegal immigrants for the same offense.
- Over 90 percent of fentanyl seizures occur at legal crossing points or interior vehicle checkpoints, not on illegal migration routes, so U.S. citizens (who are subject to less scrutiny) when crossing legally are the best smugglers.
- The location of smuggling makes sense because hard drugs at ports of entry are about 97 percent less likely to be stopped than are people crossing illegally between them.
- Just 0.02 percent of the people arrested by Border Patrol for crossing illegally possessed any fentanyl whatsoever.
- The government exacerbated the problem by banning most legal cross border traffic in 2020 and 2021, accelerating a switch to fentanyl (the easiest-to-conceal drug).
- During the travel restrictions, fentanyl seizures at ports quadrupled from fiscal year 2019 to 2021. Fentanyl went from a third of combined heroin and fentanyl seizures to over 90 percent.
- Annual deaths from fentanyl nearly doubled from 2019 to 2021 after the government banned most travel (and asylum).
In February 2023, a 37-year-old woman was caught smuggling $1 million worth of fentanyl
and meth across the US-Mexico border into California in the fuel tank of her 2016 pickup truck.
She wasn’t an undocumented immigrant trying to sneak across the border. She was a US citizen
entering through the Andrade Port of Entry. And this is the rule, not the exception.
For 20 years, drug-involved overdose deaths have been on the rise in the United States,
with fentanyl being the number one contributor since 2016. Fentanyl is a potent and easy to manufacture
synthetic drug that is often cut with other drugs like cocaine and Percocet. Fentanyl accounted for 71,238
deaths in 2021, a 23% increase from 2020.2 Republicans are blaming this sharp increase on what they call
President Biden’s “open border” policy, claiming that undocumented migrants are bringing fentanyl across
the border.3 They point to large fentanyl seizures by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) as proof of
such policy failures.4 But Republicans are once again ignoring the facts. Fentanyl is primarily being
brought into the United States through legal ports of entry (official entrances) by US citizens.
And seizures of large amounts of fentanyl should not be derided but celebrated as the Biden
Administration’s actions to combat fentanyl trafficking are strong and getting stronger.
